Elon Musk and Peter Thiel: Two Sides of One Magic Trick

By Matthew Ehret

Chapter excerpt from Ehret’s new book Revenge of the Mystery Cults

The parallel growth of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as children of mysterious establishment families enmeshed in the elite corridors of Apartheid South Africa and earlier fascist movements before and during World War 2 is noteworthy, but not evidence that either man is a part of a broader conspiracy.

However, the parallels don’t end with their family roots or connections to the Apartheid South African elite.

As both men ascended to the higher echelons of Silicon Valley culture in the 1990s, their lives continued to cross pollinate and advance the same transhumanist programs between 1998 through to the present day.

While Elon co-founded Zip2 as his first technology startup in 1995 (essentially selling digital phone books to various companies), Thiel’s entry into tech start ups also began around that time with his launching of a software company named Confinity in 1998.

Before that, Thiel had begun to make a name for himself as an innovative Straussian in Stanford University, where he founded the libertarian Stanford Review in 1987, serving as its editor-in-chief until his 1992 graduation.[1]

The Stanford Review received patronage from non-other than former Trotskyite and early Straussian Irving Kristol who led in the formation of the neoconservative movement during the Cold War and that movement’s acquisition of political power in the USA in 2000. The era of the ‘New Crusaders’ that launched forever wars abroad after 9/11 and a vast surveillance dragnet within the USA were all Straussians.[2]

This fact will become extra important later in this chapter.

After working as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse in 1993 and then a securities lawyer for the CIA-affiliated law firm Sullivan and Cromwell,[3] Thiel co-founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996 followed soon thereafter by his first digital payments company named Confinitity in 1998 where his life would begin to merge with that of Elon.

Although Elon Musk has made much noise proclaiming his having cut ties with his abusive father Errol Musk upon leaving South Africa for Canada at the age of 17, according to his own words, his father provided $20,000 of the original investment that got his startup company Zip2 online in 1997.[4]

This is but one of many data points indicating that a thick veneer of false narrative has been carefully built up around the persona of Musk as a self-made libertarian genius who worked his way to becoming the richest man on earth from the status of a poor student living on crackers.

While Elon has stated that it was hard work, and personal resilience mixed with fortunate scholarships that paid his way through school, it is known that Elon actually co-owned an entire frat house in Pennsylvania where he was studying for his Bachelor of Arts.

While co-owning this frat house, Elon created a scandal by transforming it into a nightclub, and despite having done so illegally, appears to have never suffered any legal issues by campus or municipal authorities.[5]

Despite the fact that Zip2 was little more than a digital yellow pages, Compaq decided that it was a worthwhile investment and poured $341 million to purchase the start up in 1999 which netted Elon $22 million.

With this money, Elon was able to co-found X.com with Greg Koury as a boutique company that would specialize in online payments outside of conventional banking channels.

Within months of founding X.com, the company merged with another digital payments company called ‘Confinity’ that had been founded by Peter Thiel a year earlier. This new company quickly received a rebranded image under the new name of ‘Paypal’.

In 2002, Paypal was purchased by Ebay for $1.5 billion, scoring a $175 million for Elon, and $55 million for Thiel.

At this point, both Elon and Thiel were given patronage and direct support by leading directors of the CIA’s official venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.[6]

With his new-found wealth, Peter Thiel established a new private surveillance agency named Palantir in 2004 which drew its name from the all-seeing indestructible crystal balls used in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which granted its users the power to literally see and hear everything in the world.

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In-Q-Tel became the first official financial backer of Thiel’s Palantir in 2004 providing the original $2 million funding to launch the new tech surveillance firm. [8]

The CIA’s interest in Palantir at this period was not so much due to American security as it was due to the failure of an earlier project dubbed ‘Total Information Awareness’.

The Rise and Re-branding of Total Information Awareness

In the wake of September 11, 2001, the newly emergent neoconservative social engineers introduced a ‘solution’ to the problem of international terrorism in the form of the first iteration of a vast surveillance dragnet dubbed ‘Total Information Awareness’ (TIA) featuring a logo with a pyramid and the eye of Horus.

The program proposed to manage a total surveillance state and even began innovating predictive policing algorithms. This new science of control would attempt to monitor and measure every citizen’s actions, electronic communications and even proposed to predict where future crimes would occur using probability theory.

The founders of the project called it the “Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism”.

Although the Orwellian branding resulted in significant public backlash, the program was not shut down but merely rebranded to ‘Terrorism Information Awareness’ in 2004. This new Manhattan Project also continued and pioneered the science of biometric identification, facial recognition, and other technologies useful only under the conditions of dictatorship. Among the rebranding was included the creation of a civilian agency named Palantir.

The architect of TIA was the same Admiral John Poindexter who had overseen the Iran-Contra scandal with General Oliver North in the 1980s, and who (with North) had already promoted an off-the-books intelligence apparatus directed by the CIA which could be sold to the population as a ‘civilian’ contractor as far back as 1986.

The surveillance/database infrastructure then developed during the 1980s to satisfy this need was named ‘MAINCORE’ and the purpose was to keep track of all information of ‘potential disruptive individuals’ to be arrested “in time of panic” or “national crisis”. Later on, MAINCORE spawned such surveillance programs as GENOA, Genysis and PRISM.

Despite being sentenced to five years in prison for his role overseeing Iran Contra, Poindexter’s career did not suffer terribly, as his sentence was commuted to several months, and the neocon spent the next two decades working as a defense contractor, DARPA analyst and architect of TIA.

Thiels’ biographer Max Chafkin explains[9] that just before Palantir was created, John Poindexter and then-CIA director George Tenet were introduced to both Thiel and fellow Palantir creator Alex Karp by none other than leading neoconservative strategist and leading Straussian, Richard Perle. Among Palantir’s military intelligence clients are found the CIA, FBI, NSA, CDC, Marine Corps, Air Force, Special Operations Command, and Westpoint[10]. But that’s not all.

The London Guardian wrote that “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data efficient fighting of war. It runs Wall Street too”.[11]

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It is here that Thiel celebrates the need for the cut-throat world of espionage and power projection of a world empire enforced by the military and political influence of the USA when he writes:

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”

The Echelon Project referred to by Thiel is the largest global surveillance program managed by the Five Eyes and created in the 1960s as a military intelligence surveillance program. Echelon would have been the principal agency interfacing with and directing the operations of Palantir at the time of Thiel’s writing.

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Elon Musk, X and Tesla 2.0

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Like Thiel’s Palantir, SpaceX and its Starlink subsidiary would soon become a dominant contractor to the US military industrial complex under a civilian veneer.

Also, like Thiel, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel was also on hand for the launching of SpaceX as Michael Griffin, the President of In-Q-Tel accompanied Musk to Russia in order to negotiate a purchase of several ICBM rockets in 2002. Despite the fact that the Russians refused Musk’s offers, it is acknowledged that this trip was the origin for SpaceX itself.

[…]

Between 2005-2009, Griffin was a favorite among the Straussians managing post-9/11 USA and was appointed to become the Administrator of NASA where he directly oversaw the agency’s embrace of the ‘New Space Movement’. This new ‘movement’ posited that all space research and engineering should only be managed by private billionaires who were to replace agencies such as NASA which had formerly been tied to the sovereign nation state.

Among the most important of these ‘New Space Movement’ pioneers that received the first wave of NASA contracts were Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Griffin’s former employer Orbital Sciences. Soon Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin private space company (founded in 2000) would also receive lucrative government contracts under Griffin’s lead.

The growth of Elon Musk’s contracts with both NASA as well as with the Pentagon and CIA managing the largest array of space-based surveillance and increasingly an infrastructure for space-based weaponry under the veil of ‘civilian ownership’ parallels Thiel’s operations in many ways.

Not only has Elon’s operations served as a cover for a myriad of military intelligence companies controlling ‘cutting edge’ patents that are permitted into the public domain, but Elon’s involvement with Thiel since the late 1990s and his involvement with the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Behaviorist Economics takeover of the USA plays a major role in reviving his grandfather’s ambitions for a Global Technate managed by elite social engineers.

Silicon Valley Billionaires Merge with Behaviorists

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Rather than suppose that societal control had to be of a simply top-down OR bottom-up nature, these ‘Third Way’ behaviorists rationalized that the APPEARANCE of personal choice could be protected satisfying libertarian proclivities for personal freedom on the one side, while the ACTUAL top-down controls for an elite network of social engineers could be held firmly intact outside of the influence of the animalistic masses.

In other words, the ‘Third Way’ was merely a modified re-hashing of Strauss’ interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which posited that societal equilibrium could only be maintained if the vast majority of the population were kept locked within a cave believing that their perception of shadows cast by a managerial elite was the only reality that existed.

The leading behaviorist economists gathered around the Edge Foundation, and which served as Technocratic managers of the ‘Good Plutocrats’ such as Bezos, Musk and Thiel were explicitly attempting to revive the theories of John Locke and Behaviorist Psychiatrist B.F. Skinner in 21st century garb.

Recapitulating the X as the Behaviorist Secret Sauce

John Locke’s ‘X’, and Strauss’s Noble Lie studied by Thiel were directly shaped by the view that human beings must never be permitted to participate in serious discussions of the realm of higher ideas shaping reality.

Instead, humans could be allowed to have opinions shaped by perceptions (forever ungrounded in actual ‘knowledge’ of course) and the freedom to pursue lusts based on those perceptions.

These opinions and lusts would create the basis of a system of ‘scientific controls’ or a ‘hedonistic calculus’ outlined by Jeremy Bentham (following Locke) for an elite class which Locke believed himself to be a member.

And only this elite governing class would be permitted to control the influences shaping the lusts and perceptions of the masses which formed their convictions.

As Thiel also outlined in his Straussian Moment essay of 2007; All systems dominated by an elite class of human gods from ancient times through the rise of the British Empire required two simultaneous sets of doctrines and governing myths in order to function. One set for the masses would serve as an exoteric structure of beliefs, values, moralities and traditions which would define the boundaries of the masses and another darker esoteric set of beliefs, moralities values and traditions for those assigned to control society.

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Via https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/elon-musk-and-peter-thiel-two-sides